From inside the European Parliament building: a Holocaust remembrance worthy of the name
Where there is a will, there is a way. The conference entitled “Tragedy of the Holocaust in Latvia” prepared by Member of Parliament Tatjana Zdanoka (Latvia) duly took place yesterday evening in her offices with all scheduled participants recording their speeches before an i-phone, with the film ‘Restoring the names,’ the center piece of the conference, being ‘screened’ on a laptop computer. In total, we were nine participants, six of whom had been flown in especially from Latvia. The three ‘locals’ were Tatjana Zdanoka, myself and a very brave and devoted Italian MEP who disregarded Tatjana’s ‘radioactive’ status due to the espionage witch hunt being brought against her by Latvian political opponents and delivered a short but powerful speech on the rise of neo-fascism in Europe.
All of these audio-visual materials will be posted online in a week or so, and when that happens I will re-post the links on this website. The material is very important and merits public discussion at the pan-European and global level because it raises questions that go far beyond the concerns of the Latvian speakers. They have their own very specific and justified fears about resurgent neo-Nazism in their country for which the most persuasive single piece of evidence is the annual gatherings in Riga for Latvian Legion Day to honor those who served in the Waffen-SS during WWII.
Just as the Nazi collaborationist Bandera is celebrated in Ukraine under the Zelensky regime, so in Latvia their own collaborationists are honored in the traditional march on 16 March through the streets of Riga which some members of the Latvian state government attend, in violation of EU law and rulings. In addition there is an ongoing year-round cultural offensive that insinuates into the public schools a film presenting those home grown murderers of Jews and other targeted civilians in a favorable light as defenders of the Latvian nation against Soviet occupiers and against their own non-ethnic Latvian minorities (read: Jews and Russians).
The speeches delivered yesterday evening have Europe-wide importance, because of the way those two named minorities were and are intertwined. The genocide practiced by Nazi Germany targeted both for extermination. For anyone who doubts this assertion, there is vast documentary evidence of what is today called ‘intent to commit genocide’ from the time of the Nazi-imposed Siege of Leningrad 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944. More than a million Russian civilians died from starvation, lack of heating supplies in winter conditions of minus 40 degrees C and bombardment.
The post-Soviet ethnic cleansing intent of the Latvian government is silent about Jews but puts great emphasis on ridding the country of all traces of Russians by making life intolerable for them. I have written about this in past essays: see Does Russia Have a Future, 2015, “Latvia’s 300,000 Non-Citizens and the Ukrainian Crisis Today” (pp 137-140) and “Latvia’s Failed U.S. Inspired Policies Towards Russia and Russians” and A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, 2019, “Republic of Latvia, Apartheid State within the EU” (pp. 308-315).
Just how the fate in Latvia of its two minorities, Jews and Russians, are intertwined was made clear in human terms as opposed to dry statistics by the testimony we heard yesterday evening from Igors Glazunovs, the son of a Jewish father and Russian mother, who was born in a prison outside Riga where his mother, a servicewoman in the Soviet army, was detained in July 1941. This was further amplified by the testimony of the conference organizer, Tatjana Zdanoka, also of mixed ancestry, whose grandparents were murdered by the Nazi occupiers of Riga in one of their two raids on the Riga Ghetto that occurred on 30 November and 8 December 1941.
Yes, when you look at the dates, you understand that the purge of Jewry, Communists and other ‘sub-humans’ was one of the first objectives of the German forces who invaded the USSR and touched off WWII on 22 June 1941. Within a couple of weeks, German land and sea units took control of the Latvian port city of Liepaja, where Glazunov’s parents were posted. A few weeks later, they were in Riga where they hastened to establish a Jewish Ghetto where none had previously existed.
The author of the film about the Ghetto yesterday shed some light on its creation and destruction.
When the Germans installed themselves in Riga in the summer of 1941, they expelled residents of several downtown streets and herded into this confined space, now ‘an open-air prison,’ all of those unfortunates whom they could identify as Jews. The ‘indigenous’ Riga Jews were put in a part designated as the Lesser Ghetto, while Jewish refugees from Germany and elsewhere in the Baltic region were put in the Greater Ghetto. They all suffered the same fate. The Ghetto was cut off from the world. Its occupants were starved. And they were then taken out to a forest not far from Riga and shot on the dates mentioned above after being forced to lie down in rows on top of one another following the technique first practiced outside Kiev in Baby Yar a month earlier under the supervision of the very same SS officer.
Note that the number of Jews in the Riga Ghetto murdered in 1941 was 26,000. This is a number that has a certain resonance for those of us following developments in Gaza today, which is one reason I say that the conference yesterday evening was very relevant to Europe as a whole and to the broader world. Those who have been saying ‘Never Again’ have to re-think a lot of things.
But there is more to the story that has direct relevance to current international affairs and the looming World War III. I have in mind Russophobia, for which Latvia is a key disseminator within the European Union and the world at large. By Russophobia, we mean racial, ethnic hatred. This is the very same Russophobia that has infected the elites of the Federal Republic of Germany and drives forward their and the EU’s support for the Kiev regime in its fight against Russia. Their ambition is to bring down the ‘Putin regime’ at any price. Put in simple English, the ambition is to kill as many Russians as possible and set the country’s development back several decades.
Jews and Russians. It is more than a straw in the wind that the Germans have to this day continued paying their monthly reparations to Jewish survivors of the Siege living in Russia while they pay nothing to Russian survivors of the Siege.
Before closing, I offer a word of comment on the film Riga Ghetto. Remembering the Names. A link to the film was distributed yesterday to all Members of the European Parliament. Hopefully some will view it. When Zdanoka makes the link publicly available, I will post it here.
The film is just 13 minutes long. It tells the story of the ghetto victims with great dignity and restraint, putting a name and face on 19 of those who were murdered, ranging in age from school children to grandparents.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024